The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor

I'm not going to pretend I didn't like the first two Mummy movies. They were dumb in places, but had some all right humor and undead-destroying action, with the first being a pretty competent tribute to those old movie serials as far as I know. The third film is just too little too late, though. The writer/director of the first two is gone, moved on to the uh... greener pastures of G.I. Joe. Rachel Weisz is gone, replaced by Maria Bello, who's not bad, but not as good. The classic Egyptian theme is gone, replaced with a Chinese setting instead, which isn't a terrible idea but doesn't get executed perfectly. It's cool that Jet Li and Michelle Yeoh are in it, but in the end they don't do much. They have a couple brief scenes showing of their talents, but Yeoh is gone for most of the film and Li is replaced by an incomplete, Computer-enhanced version with magic elemental powers. Because he's Asian, you see.

There's some not-that-funny jokes and not-that-exciting effect-laden action sequences as both sides race to Shangri-La, where a magic artifact will blah blah blah. There's some crappy looking yetis, some clumsy romance developed between the O'Connell's annoying son who hasn't improved with age and a change in actor and a 2,000 year old teenage ninja, and a big final epic battle where two mummified armies clash to little consequence. I feel like I'm being harsh on the movie, because it wasn't actively boring or hate-worthy. It just rarely if ever succeeds at what the first two films did right, and I just don't like the shift in setting. If the second movie was somewhere else, maybe Arabian or something, then it would be fine for each one to have a different villain and be a globe-hopping Mummy-killing franchise. But it was a direct sequel, with the exact same bad guy, and the new setting and villain along with it coming out seven years later just makes it feel like the black sheep of the series, which it ultimately is.